Isabella and the Pot of Basil

Posted by Meg Nola Aug 24, 2008

I’ve always liked William Holman Hunt’s Isabella and the Pot of Basil (1868), and thought it might have been based on an Italian girl he encountered while living abroad. Maybe a beautiful servant daydreaming while tending her herbs…but no, that’s apparently not the right story. Hunt’s Isabella was inspired by a John Keats’ poem, which in turn was inspired by an episode from Boccaccio’s Decameron. In this tale, Isabella and Lorenzo were lovers. Lorenzo worked for Isabella’s greedy and snobbish brothers, who didn’t approve of the romance. The brothers killed Lorenzo to get him out of the picture and told Isabella that he’d gone away traveling. She waited unhappily for Lorenzo’s return, but then she had a dream in which he told her he was dead. When she found his body, she honestly and truly took his decapitated head and kept it near her in a large pot of basil, which she of course watered with her tears. A twisted form of devotion for sure, and as to whether anyone was cooking with Lorenzo’s basil, I really don’t want to know.

Hunt's painting is full of lush color and detail, his earthily barefoot Isabella resting her head on the pot that holds Lorenzo’s head. Hunt’s fellow Pre-Raphaelite, John William Waterhouse, painted his version in 1907, showing a dramatically posed, almost stage-like Isabella. American artist John White Alexander took on the subject as well in 1897, with an Isabella who floats through eerie, dreamlike tones. Keats includes pretty sepulchral details beyond the decapitation, such as Isabella combing the dead Lorenzo’s hair and cleaning his presumably decomposing face. Intense stuff -- yet perhaps in her own miserable way, she was just trying to bring life back from tragedy.

** This original blog post has been expanded into a Suite101 article, with more detail on the paintings and links to the text of the poem. Click here to read. **